Creating a Narrative:
Sam Adams launched his campaign to mobilize King George III’s American subjects against British rule when Parliament began taxing them in the spring of 1764. Using American Revolutionary Tools, Adams and his compatriots spent the next several years barraging their countrymen with warnings. They emphasized that, by imposing taxes without their consent, Parliament was violating their rights as Englishmen, rights guaranteed under England’s “unwritten” constitution.
By the time Lord North closed the Port of Boston on 1 June 1774, Adams had abandoned his constitutional rights campaign and replaced it with a natural rights campaign. (At the 20 November 1772 Boston Town Meeting, he announced that Natural Rights were inalienable, and that because King George III was infringing on them, he had forfeited his authority to rule the American colonies.)
An examination of the sequence of events shows that Adams developed his second “argument from right” because he needed a rationale to justify political independence!
Adams’ second rights argument is now connected to the folklore idea that John Locke claimed in his Second Treatise of Government (1689) that “Life, Liberty, and Property” are inherent rights that belong to all men.
Thomas Jefferson neither knew nor cared that Locke never thought or said this. When Jefferson agreed to draft a colonial declaration of independence, his agreed to create a propaganda piece to support Adams’ push for political separation from England. Adams’ faux Lockean claim about inalienable rights was just what Jefferson needed. To bolster his natural right claims, Jefferson linked them to a second mangled piece of Lockean political logic.
The so-called “right to revolution” was, according to Sam Adams, the right to replace governments that trample on the natural rights of their citizens. Because King George III was doing this, Jefferson repeated, they had the right to replace his government. Patriots in the Continental Congress agreed and severed the colonies’ political ties to England. King George III suspended his effort to regain control of his American colonies seven years later.
The man from Monticello immortalized himself by incorporating two faux Lockean ideas into the Declaration of Independence.
Adapting Sam Adams’ method to the Second American Revolution:
Fittingly, Jefferson is the subject of the second book in author James C Thompson’s American Revolutions Series. In The Second American Revolution – How two Virginia Partisans Poisoned America’s Political System, Thompson reconstructs the decade-long insurgency Jefferson and James Madison conducted against Alexander Hamilton and his program to end the economic depression that was triggered by the American victory in the War for Political Independence.
Jefferson began his insurgency shortly after becoming George Washington’s first Secretary of State (in March of 1790). It ended with his hair’s breadth victory over Aaron Burr in their run-off in the House of Representatives in February 1801.
Jefferson’s Second American Revolution floated through an ocean of propaganda. A memorable part of it grew out of the “dinner bargain” Jefferson made with Alexander Hamilton during a dinner he hosted for Hamilton and Madison in June of 1790. Given the amount of information Jefferson had, if he struck an unfavorable bargain with Washington’s brilliant Treasury Secretary, it was because he thought he was making a good deal, not, as he later said, because Hamilton “hoodwinked” him. He was, he later insisted, an innocent with no ulterior motives while Hamilton was a conniving villain.
Madison helped blacken Hamilton’s image in the minds of his southern constituents by unleashing his “Republican Press” to disparage Hamilton. Madison’s Princeton classmate, Philip Freneau, responded by labeling the hero of Yorktown and primary author of the Federalist Papers as the unprincipled leader of a pro-administration faction who planned to use “force or corruption to govern men.” Men like Washington and Hamilton, Freneau continued, were preparing their “vulgar minds for aristocratical ranks and hereditary powers with titles.”
Hamilton was not only a “monarchist.” According to Jefferson, he supported “a monarchy bottomed on corruption.” Jefferson also condemned him as a “self-serving stock jobber from New York” whose objectives were to create a hierarchy of wealth and “enslave” the American people. Jefferson’s congressional ally, William Branch Giles, announced on the floor of the House that “the Secretary of the Treasury has been guilty of maladministration in the duties of his office” and that he should “be removed from office by the President of the United States.” The Congress subsequently cleared Hamilton of all charges.
Early in his narrative, Thompson points out that Jefferson and Madison’s insurgency against Hamilton was fundamentally different from Sam Adams’ insurgency against King George III. Adams invoked his Right to Revolution to replace an existing government with a new one that he and his compatriots would control.
Jefferson and Madison planned to gain control of America’s new republican government by dividing the American people against themselves and creating voting majorities in the South and West. By winning elections in these regions, they became the political majority, which gave them the power to make the law. Jefferson’s used it to control the government for a generation!
Madison’s adversarial party politics proved so effective that it has remained in use ever since: candidates align with a party; they produce streams of propaganda that vilify their opponents; then they send wardmen to get their voters to the polls on election day. Thanks to this adversarial system, truth and the common good have virtually disappeared from the American political process.
After Thomas Jefferson:
Jefferson dimmed as a political beacon in the decades after his death. He remained in the political closet until 1904 when Paul Leicester Ford resurrected him. In Thompson’s vernacular, Ford created Faux Thomas Jefferson.
Thompson’s third book is Faux Thomas Jefferson – A 20th Century Fiction. In it, he explains that Ford began an ongoing process to replace the real man. Why? Ford and his successors wanted an icon to lead the Progressive Reform Movement that was getting under way in the beginning of the 20th century.
Ford cast the slave-owning Virginia squire as the spiritual leader of America’s working classes who were then engaged in a Marxian struggle against Capitalists. Jefferson had directed a ten-year rebellion against Alexander Hamilton and his crony hierarchy of northern money lenders. But his writings show that the motive of his “revolution” was to gain control of the government, not to protect the rights of his countrymen.
The Third American Revolution:
Author James C. Thompson calls the final work in his American Revolutions Series The Third American Revolution – The Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Hierarchy. In this provocative narrative, Thompson traces the final descent of America’s freedom-loving society into the managed system Alexis de Tocqueville warned against in 1840.
The third American revolution, Thompson explains, centered on creating America’s “benevolent government,” which Franklin Roosevelt superintended during the 1930s.
Roosevelt, a.k.a. “Big Brother,” wanted to relieve the human suffering caused by the Depression. To accomplish this, he assembled an army of bureaucrats to organize and administer his “New Deal.” Americans wanted help, but they were unsure about transferring their independence to a network of unelected bureaucrats.
To win their support, Big Brother polished Faux Thomas Jefferson into a trustworthy bellwether and used him to lead the American people into the pasture he was preparing for them.
This undertaking was supported by an ethereal partnership Thompson calls the “Political-Historical Complex” (P-HC). This partnership brought together a circle of prominent Jefferson scholars and a circle of political and agency men.
Their first project was to plan the 150th anniversary celebration for the Declaration of Independence. The masterpiece of propaganda the P-HC produced during its first twenty-years was the apotheosis of Faux Thomas Jefferson as the Champion of the Common Man. “FDR” completed his elevation on the 200th anniversary of the real man’s birth while dedicating the Jefferson Memorial.
In 1967, P-HC member Bernard Bailyn, Professor of History at Harvard, rewrote America’s history in his celebrated text, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Gone from America’s new history and heritage were the indivdual rights that Sam Adams placed at the center of his patriotic propaganda. In their place, the Harvard scholar identified Equality and Social Justice as the driving forces behind the American Revolution and the society that formed in its wake.
This mid-20th century social logic reinforced the authority of Big Brother’s Tocquevillean shepherds to manage a Tocquevillean flock of American sheep. Selling this system to the American people, Thompson contends, was the greatest propaganda campaign in human history. It changed the world!
Propaganda in the Digital Age
The internet has revolutionized how organizations operate. Online campaigns rouse millions to join political causes. Crowdfunding provides money to pay for them. Social media facilitates communication, collaboration, and mobilization on a global scale.
Someone once observed that there is nothing new under the sun. Today’s issues and movements are excellent examples of this. As with the First, Second, and Third American Revolutions, today’s revolutions rely on rights rhetoric and other emotion-generating oratory that is crafted by professional opinion-makers. But thanks to the internet, the campaigns these influencers direct dwarf the ones Adams, Jefferson, and Roosevelt conducted. WOW!
Final Note – American Revolutionary Tools
Author James C. Thompson explains in The First Revolutions In the Minds of the People that the first American revolution was about propaganda and organization, not fighting for political independence.
In the next three books in his American Revolutions Series, Thompson shows how, for almost two and a half centuries, propaganda and organization have shaped public opinion and channeled political power into the hands of Tocquevillean hierarchic. They are working harder now than ever!
It’s time for you to understand what’s going on. The First Revolutions In the Minds of the People and The Second American Revolution – How Two Partisan Virginians Poisoned the American Political System are available on Amazon. Faux Thomas Jefferson – A 20th Century American Fiction and The Third American Revolution – The Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Hierarchy are on the way. Pick up your copies today, and join the next American revolution!
